Exhilaration of Wings: The Literature of Birdwatching

FROM OUR EDITORS

Taking Flight

Two years ago, when I was living in Ohio, I discovered a flock of large birds circling overhead every afternoon, roosting in the tall trees behind my house. Someone told me they were turkey vultures, so I got a pair of binoculars and sat out on my porch and watched them. They'd leave every morning to find their food -- a squished groundhog, a dead rabbit lying by the side of the road -- and come back at dusk, circling one another before heading back to their trees for the night.

That is what is so appealing about birdwatching -- anyone with access to birds and a decent set of binoculars can do it. It doesn't matter where you live, because birds are everywhere. There is a slowness to them that is calming. In our high-tech, fast-paced world, birds still follow the rhythms they have for thousands of years. They hunt, flirt, mate, sing, and build their nests. There are mysteries about them that will be revealed to the careful, patient observer, and some mysteries that will never be known.

We are fortunate to have had many birdwatchers who were also excellent writers, and that's where Jen Hill's new book, An Exhilaration of Wings, comes in. Hill has gathered some of the finest 19th-century writing about birds and excerpted tantalizing selections. There are some famous naturalists (John Muir, John James Audubon), some famous people who sometimes wrote about birds (Thoreau, Theodore Roosevelt), and some now-obscure but excellent writers, many of whom were well-known in their day. It is the latter group that makes this book a treasure. Their work is unfamiliar and probably hard to find. Who was Winthrop Packard, for example? (He doesn't merit a mention in the "selected biographies" section.) I don't know, but his treatise on the flight of a nighthawk is astonishing: Only once have I ever seen one sky-coasting, falling like a dark star from a height where he seemed but a mote in the gold.... It was as if his wings had lost their hold on the thinner air of this remote height. He half shut them to his body and dived head foremost on a perilous slant. Then, just as he must be dashed to pieces on the gray rock of the ledge on which I sat, he spread them wide, caught the air that sang through the wide-spread primaries with a clear, deep-toned note, and rose again; and in his "peent, peent" was a quaint note of self-satisfaction and praise.

According to Hill, writing about birds as we know it began in 1789 with the publication of Gilbert White's The Natural History of Selbourne, the first book to present birdwatching in anecdotal, narrative prose rather than simply in encyclopedic, scientific classifications. In America, William Bartram's Travels Through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida of 1791 made a similar splash. Both books helped usher in the Romantic period, a time when poets such as Wordsworth and Keats and painters like those of the Hudson River Valley school helped turn nature from a dark, foreboding place into a lush, bucolic landscape where city dwellers went for leisure.

Both Bartram and White are well-represented here, as are Olive Thorne Miller and Florence Merriam, two women who were active in the conservation movements of the late 1800s and sought to convert people through their writing. Jen Hill is to be commended for bringing these forgotten writers back to light. An Exhilaration of Wings is a charming book, delightful to dip into on a summer day while watching the starlings and hummingbirds out the kitchen window, or in the winter to be reminded of their songs. As Hill writes in her introduction, these writers' "prose instructs and reveals, and manages to carve out a little quiet space in which a connection is made between reader, writer, and bird, across time and space."

—Gail Jaitin

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Jen Hill has, for the first time, gathered together the most vital and engaging writings on birdwatching. More than seventy-five writers -- including John Muir, John James Audubon, and Susan Fenimore Cooper, as well as lesser-known writers and amateur ornithologists -- share their infectious observations about birdsong, migration, nests, raptors, sea birds, hummingbirds, and much more.

Each selection evokes and explores what the passion for birds is all about. By turns practical, lyrical, humorous, literary, even mystical, they illuminate the magical and occasionally unexpected ways in which birding connects us both to the history of the natural world and to that of human experience.

FROM THE CRITICS

Seattle Times

The authorial voices are as varied and remarkable as the very bird life observed.

Philadelphia Inquirer

[An] engaging collection.

Kirkus Reviews

A diverting collection of brief pieces drawn primarily from British and American works of the 19th and early 20th centuries. As Hill, a doctoral candidate in literature at Cornell, notes, these writings "remind us both of our past and of the timeless pleasure of birdwatching." Her selections are from the writings of such well-known literary figures as Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson, Wordsworth, Goldsmith, and Browning, and of acute observers of nature like Audubon, Thoreau, and John Muir. The journals of a very young Theodore Roosevelt—who records collecting old nests but not eggs—are also quoted. Most of the selections, however, are from unfamiliar sources, some of whom are given brief biographies in the back of the book. Hill groups her selections into a variety of overlapping categories: bird activities, such as nest building and migration; birds in particular habitats, such as sea and shore, woodland and meadow; kinds of birds, e.g., raptors and hummingbirds. Other chapters focus on songs, eggs, physiology, and extinction. Selections range from philosophical musings to matter-of-fact physical descriptions to emotional outbursts to play-by-play action reports. One indignant 18th-century birdwatcher calls the eagle an "execrable tyrant," while a 19th-century one accuses the sparrow hawk of being a "feathered freebooter.." More in keeping with today's less anthropomorphic view of birds is a vivid description by an early 20th-century observer who witnessed an encounter between two nesting crows and an intruding squirrel that left the nest untouched and the squirrel battered and bloody. This is a book to browse in, to pick up and put down, again and again. Whileit's not necessary to be a birder to enjoy this small collection, it would be a welcome addition to the library of anyone who is. (23 b&w illustrations)